Akrotiri peninsula: the Ancient Akrotiri Project (University of Leicester)

At Akrotiri-Dreamer's Bay on the Akrotiri peninsula, the Ancient Akrotiri Project found long rectangular shoreline buildings, used from the 3rd century AD and built as early as the 2nd, and found no sign of the port town they had been assumed to belong to¹. The project began around 2014, when a Ministry of Defence official, concerned at erosion of the shoreline remains, started a scheme to explore and document the archaeology; the rescue foray of September 2015 grew into a research initiative on the whole peninsula¹. Simon James of the University of Leicester led it, with Vicki Score of University of Leicester Archaeological Services as onshore field director and Lucy Blue of the University of Southampton directing the underwater campaigns¹. The Honor Frost Foundation and the Council for British Research in the Levant were among the funders¹. Land seasons ran annually from 2016 to 2019, staffed by volunteers, students and military personnel, with underwater work in 2018, 2019 and 2023^1,2.

The shoreline buildings, Structures 1 to 5, had stone foundations, probably mudbrick superstructures and some tile roofing, and stood along half a kilometre west of the bay with walled courtyards¹. Structure 5 was destroyed with amphorae and used cooking pots left in place under fallen walls. The excavators take the destruction as very likely the mid-4th-century earthquake that devastated Kourion¹. The authors read the finds, which include amphorae, a probable sail-maker's needle and a small weight with a chi-rho monogram, as evidence of storage and ship maintenance¹. The authors argue that Dreamer's Bay was a concentration of maritime facilities and not a nucleated port town, and that their stratified evidence places the buildings earlier than the 5th and 6th centuries given by Leidwanger (2013) and by Leonard and Demesticha (2004)¹. On the hilltop (Area 7), a multi-phase stone complex held LR1 amphora fragments and a 6th/7th-century buckle-plate¹. Offshore, stone anchors, ceramics and imported columns east of the breakwater are interpreted as a 6th to 7th century shipwreck¹.

In June and July 2023 the divers, directed by Maria Michael and Lucy Blue, surveyed the breakwater and mapped the tile wreck, and relocated five of the ten anchors found in 2019; two were lifted and transferred to the Local Archaeological Museum of Kourion². The main synthesis is by James, Blue, Rogers and Score, published in Levant in 2021¹. The site lies inside the RAF Akrotiri airbase with restricted access, and part of one courtyard wall has been lost to the sea¹.